B.

In March and April the Annex will present a major new installation by local sculptor Richard Reddaway. This is a site-specific project, where the artist has created a new work especially for the Annex gallery space. It is a major exhibition in the Annex's 1993 programme of contemporary New Zealand art.

Richard Reddaway was born in Lower Hutt in 1962. He moved to Christchurch in 1981 to study at the University of Canterbury completing a Diploma in Fine Arts with Honours in sculpture in 1985. Reddaway has exhibited his sculpture and photomontage work regularly throughout New Zealand since 1984. His first international professional experience came in 1987, when he travelled to Perth as an Arts Council sponsored participant in Limited Sedition, ARX '87. In 1989 he travelled to Germany to study sculpture under Christian Megert at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademic. In October 1992 Reddaway returned to Europe on an international artists exchange programme organized by the Abel Tasman Commission in Holland. This exchange coincided with the installation at Leiden, Holland of the exhibition Distance Looks Our Way: Ten Artists from New Zealand, in which Reddaway's work features. This exhibition opened at EXPO in Seville and is now touring through Europe.

As well as being a working artist, Reddaway has taught sculpture at the University of Canterbury's School of Fine Arts, and the Christchurch Studio School. Works by Reddaway are included in private and public collections throughout New Zealand.

Over the last decade Richard Reddaway has developed a distinctive personal style, realising the human form in a variety of materials and processes. Reddaway typically constructs his sculpture from readily available contemporary materials such as broken crockery, formica, shells, cloth, and 'house-building' materials such as concrete and cast aluminium. Recently he has used the printed word as a material for construction.

Reddaway's works are generally concerned with the expression of relationships – the relationship of people as individuals, as society, and the relationship of people with their constructed environment.

The installation at the Annex will bring together two and three-dimensional figures conceived in various materials and relationships of scale.

('Richard Reddaway: New Sculpture', Bulletin, No.83, February/March 1993, p.4)